He passed the binoculars to Paul. “We have a new wrinkle.”
.G.
Paul at first looked at the horses coming down the stretch then slowly panned over to the right side of the track and the high-fenced entrance gate to the vital New York City facility. “Hmmm. The good news is if they stay in the vehicles we can take them out in the first seconds with the two shoulder-fireds we have left. Then take out the guardhouse with the SAW.”
“You think the glass not to be bulletproof?”
“Highly unlikely. Bullet resistant maybe, but under a full concentration of three hundred 5.56 mm rounds, the booth and everything in it will be shredded in three seconds.”
“Good then. I do not have to concern myself with this end?”
“No, I will give the proper directives to the northern team. They will be ready and effective,” Paul said.
“I hope you’ll make the same report on our men in Michigan. They too need to be ready and effective,” Dequa said dryly as he rose from his seat and walked up the aisle to the exit.
Paul followed as the track announcer broadcast, “Hanny’s Hanover coming up the inside rail, Mama’s Boy closing, they are neck and neck . . . and at the wire, its Hanny’s Hanover by a nose! Mama’s Boy second and Sweet Night to show.”
On the seats they just left was the winning ticket, which paid twenty-eight dollars.
.G.
Sharon Cass waited in the private office of the administrator of Walter-Reade medical center. Owing to her status as the wife of a cabinet member, albeit recently resigned, she was afforded every comfort.
The hospital administrator entered with the head of his psychiatric unit, Dr. Mark Haden.
“Mrs. Cass, the good news is that your husband is not suffering from a mental disorder.”
The woman breathed a big sigh of relief. “Then what made him act that way, Doctor?”
“Were you aware your husband was taking pills for his duodenal ulcer?”
“Why yes. It was very uncomfortable for him at times, almost debilitating.”
“Yes, he told us, and he also mentioned he sought and obtained experimental drugs from Europe, not approved by the FDA.”
“I do remember that at first the medicine his doctor prescribed was not helping much. He complained about that all the time.”
“Well, Mrs. Cass, the intense medication he obtained is also indicated to manifest bouts of paranoia in a large percentage of patients. Now in Europe they monitor for exactly that condition, but your husband being under no such care, and the drug not available here in the US, meant he was being affected by the high dosage he was self-administering. H2 blockers, even FDA approved ones, are regularly monitored for paranoia symptoms.”
“Will he recover?”
“Yes, over time the effects will dissipate and we’ll get him on a diet, and a lower dose protocol. But you can help by monitoring what medicines he is taking. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to call me.”
“Yes, thank you, Doctor. I will.” She didn’t mention that she had been the one to bring him a refill of pills whenever she traveled with her girlfriend to Europe.
.G.
“We’re about to move the barrels, sir,” an ATF&E bomb tech said to him. The dynamite had been removed first. They had already taken samples from the barrels to check for taggants, the chemical markers that they could take back to Washington and use to trace most explosive compounds back to their source.
“Okay, proceed.”
Harris was surprised. The feds were actually complying with his directives. It was a totally new experience for him. Looks like Burrell had juice after all, he thought.
Harris watched as two big guys using a barrel hand truck, tilted the barrel while the other slid the lip of the hand truck under. They were moving the third one when Harris spotted something. “Hold the work.” He walked over to the spot that had been covered by the barrel. “Get a set of photos of these. Somebody see if they can lift a transfer of this. Look for more . . .” Because this one was narrower than those he had seen before, Harris had hope.
“Detective?”
Harris turned as another fed approached, female this time.
“Crime scene still got a lot of lab work to do, but on the surface, these occupants ate a lot of Middle Eastern food, no liquor, no computers, not even cable. Only clothes we found were in the laundry basket. We’ll try to recover DNA on whatever soiled undies we can, but there isn’t too much here.”
“Thanks, Agent, let me know what they find.”
A Yonkers PD patrol officer approached. “Detective Harris, this is Mr. Aponte . . . He lives across the street.”
“On the corner . . .” Aponte pointed out with his thumb over his right shoulder.
“The house with the great lawn?”
“Yup.”
“So you called this in?”
“Yeah, I had asked them to turn down the racket a few days ago. The wife was all over me . . . You know, kids and all.”
“Go on.”
“Well, then last night they started up again. So she says, call the police. Hey, they seemed like okay guys, so I really didn’t want to start a block war, so I figured let me try one more time.”
“Block war? Is that a thing up here in the suburbs?”
“Try having the nicest lawn or prettiest house. People are just jealous sometimes . . . Anyway, I get here and the noise stopped, then I see the garage open . . .”
“All the way?”
“No, just a crack at the bottom. I called out, looked around, but no one was here. But the light was coming through the bottom of the door. So I opened it. Saw all the barrels, then I saw the dynamite and that’s when I called the cops. We got families and kids on this block . . .”
Harris looks around the garage, “What do you mean by racket? Loud music?”
“No, hammering, banging, even power hammer.”
“What were they banging on?” Harris said, looking around the garage for something obvious.
“I dunno.”
“Well, what kind of thing were they working on?”
“A car, I thought, but I guess I was wrong.”
“Why a car?”
“Heard a lot of metal work, pounding mostly, like banging out an old fender . . . Although, they were either really bad at it or they had a lot of fenders because it was constant over a few days and nights.”
Harris directed one of the feds whose name he luckily remembered. “Agent Bowers, can your team look for hammers and anything that might have been struck by hammers . . . Especially something metal-like.”
“There was a garbage can beat to shit here in the middle. We tagged and recorded it, then moved it.”
Harris looked to Aponte.
“Maybe this time, but the sound from before was bigger.”
He turned back to Bowers. “Keep looking . . .”
Then he turned to Aponte. “Tell me about them.”
“I really only ever talked to one of them, Wally, the friendlier one.”
“Friendlier?”
“Yeah, I had seen the others occasionally but they really kept to themselves; you know, no eye contact, never a smile. Almost like they wanted to be invisible.”
“But not Wally?”
“No, he was nice enough. Next to the others he was like, what do they call it?”
“Call what?”
“You know in the beauty pageant, the one that everybody gets along with . . . Miss Congeniality. Next to those stone-faced others, he was Miss Congeniality.”
.G.
“I hated that movie . . .” Brooke said.
Harris, who was now back in the office, smiled. “I dunno, kind of made you feds look almost human.”
“For a whole year, whenever I said, I work for the FBI, I’
d always get . . . Oh, like in Miss Congeniality?” Brooke looked down at the glossy print on her desk of the mark on the garage floor that Harris had snapped. “I liked Sandra Bullock in it, though.”
“So we may have the tire track there that could be like the one she figured out in My Cousin Vinny.”
“That wasn’t Bullock . . . it was . . . what’s her name . . . ‘You blend . . .’ Marisa Tomei!”
“Right, but what we got here struck me as narrower than a car width.”
“So tell me.”
“The lab boys.”
“Which lab would that be?” Brooke said with a slight smirk.
“The FBI lab, thank you very much. They say this tread is from the smaller wheel tire of a U-Haul type five-by-eight-foot trailer.”
“The truck on Fifth Avenue was a two-and-a-half-ton Ryder. Could it have fit in the garage?”
“No, the truck would have been too tall. But, your FBI lab rats are good. They used some kind of infrared laser thing to see roughly three sets of these on the garage floor.”
“So the U-Haul was what they were banging on?”
“Could be.”
“How much does one of those carry?”
“Eighteen hundred pounds max is what the company said.”
“They mention if they rented three out?”
“They got twenty-four thousand of these things in the Tri-State area alone.”
“You know the drill,” Brooke said as she put the picture down.
“Got a team working with their computer guys on all five-by-eight rentals that cover the period of the banging.”
“Here’s the big question, did anyone in the neighborhood see a big Ryder truck on the driveway?” Brooke said.
“No. And that’s maybe where the U-Hauls come in. Maybe they used them to bring the barrels to wherever they loaded the truck.”
“All three?”
“Two would have done the job, but maybe they weren’t good at packing.”
“And it doesn’t explain the banging.”
“Yeah, that’s nagging at me, too.”
“Good work, Harris. I wanna know if you find out anything that makes the nagging stop.”
“Will do.” Harris got up and left.
Brooke hit the intercom button on the phone. “Ask Remo and Kronos to come in to my office, please.” She looked down at the photo of the tire tread. “Twenty-four thousand . . .”
“Yes, boss,” Kronos said as he flopped down sideways on the chair in front of her with his legs over the arm. Peter Remo followed but sat like a grown up.
“Guys, I got another puzzle to add to your pile. What part of—or should I say—is there a part of bomb making that requires hammering or pounding for a long period of time?”
“You mean like tenderizing the components?” Kronos said.
“Is that a real thing or are you just being a wise ass.”
“Ass option,” Kronos said.
“We’ll look into it. Is this about the Yonkers’ bomb factory?” Remo said.
“Yes. We can’t directly tie it to the Fifth Avenue truck.”
“That’s scary. You thinking there could be another one or more trucks out there?”
“Now you know why sleep is so hard to come by.”
Remo slapped Kronos on the back. “Come on, K, let’s get on this.”
“Thanks guys.”
.G.
3 days until the attack
It took a day, but by eight in the morning the New York State Police, Troop E, Zone Two, had traced the plate to a U-Haul trailer rented out of Columbus, Ohio six weeks earlier. Paid for two months, one-way drop off service to Florida, in cash. The rental company was currently trying to track down any surveillance footage of who may have rented the five-by-eight-foot unit.
At the quarry site, three New York State highway maintenance vehicles had offloaded two bucket loaders and a bulldozer.
The owner of Seneca Excavation was on hand as well as the teacher, Mr. Herns. They both agreed that the soil in the middle of the bowl was depressed and curved in, as if a deeper excavation had suffered a collapse. The loader had hit a wheel lodged in between two boulders. The loose consistency of the dirt they were dredging out confirmed it had recently been turned, filling in the crater-like void.
They were thirty feet down when the bucket hit something. The work stopped.
A team from the army’s corps of engineers moved in with ground-penetrating radar. Their scan showed something fifteen feet further down. “Well, there’s something down there,” the army engineer said.
.G.
“Detective Harris, NYPD, for Mr. Butz.” He tapped his pencil on the desk as he waited to be connected.
The woman with an Arizona accent got back on the phone. “Well, I am real sorry, but Mr. Butz is out of the office for a brief spell. Can someone else help you?”
“I’m waiting for his call back on a very urgent matter.”
“What is this in regard to?”
“Security.”
“Hold on, maybe Mr. Wells can be of assistance . . .”
“No, I don’t . . .” Too late. She already had him on hold.
“Security. Wells . . .”
“Wells, this is Harris in New York.”
“I got it. Was just going to fax it.”
Harris took the phone from his ear and looked at it with a crazy look. “Got what?”
“The rental contract and a still from the security camera.”
“Great but don’t fax it; email it if you can.”
“Then why did you give me your fax number?”
“I didn’t.”
“Wait, who is this again?”
“Harris, NYPD.”
“Isn’t Waterloo far from New York City?”
“Are you asking in just general geographic terms or am I missing something?”
“You are not New York State Police from Waterloo?”
“No, I am working with the federal government on a threat assessment of a possible terror plot that may involve one of your trailers, with Mr. Butz.”
“Sorry, I thought you were guy from Troop E.”
“Slow down. Why don’t you start from the beginning.”
.G.
Harris burst into the conference room interrupting Brooke, Remo, Kronos, and Bridge. “We got something.”
“Good ’cause we are just retracing our steps,” Brooke said.
“Get this, some high school teacher upstate takes his class on a field trip and comes across the site of a huge explosion. They find an Ohio plate . . . a trailer plate. They dig and find a mangled five-by-eight U-Haul blown to bits.”
“This is good, Harris. Bridge you are a former UDT guy.”
“I am not that old, Brooke. We’ve called ourselves SEALS since the 60s, you know. Underwater Demolition Team was just too limiting.”
“SEALS? That’s navy. I thought you was army?” Kronos said.
“Was that too, after I got swimmer’s ear.”
“Really? That can . . .”
Brooke laughed. “No, Kronos, he was a senior chief in the navy, but then the army needed his exceptional skill set.”
“Wait, so you went from senior chief to sergeant major; isn’t that the same pay grade? What kind of sucker move . . .?”
“Kronos,” Brooke said, holding her hand up like it was Mrs. William’s kindergarten class. “Bridge, you and Harris get up there, fast.”
“How fast?” Harris said.
“Get over to the heliport. Chop out to LaGuardia. I’ll have a G5 waiting.”
“Yeah, that’s fast.”
.G.
As they trotted from the New York State Police helicopter that they’d caught on the west side of Manhattan to the gleaming FBI G5 on the t
armac at Butler Aviation, its turbo-fan engines were already turning. Harris whistled. “That Brooke certainly makes shit happen.”
“That’s because she has grit my friend. They wouldn’t dare say, ‘no,’ to her.”
As they boarded the jet, the copilot greeted them. “Look, guys, we got the call the last minute. We got no cabin attendant. So I get to do this. In the event of an emergency your masks . . .”
“Forget it. We’ve all been on a plane. Just get us in the air. How long?”
“First, I got to tell you that you must wear seatbelts . . .”
“Look, we know . . .”
“No, you don’t know . . . We are landing at Airtrek Airport.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Me neither, but it’s a dirt field. We could come down and get stuck in the dirt. That’s one hundred forty miles an hour to a squashed gnat on the windshield in point zero seconds.”
“Got it! Seatbelts, thanks.”
“We’ve got priority clearance for takeoff. You guys must be on something really hot.” He turned to enter the cockpit as the stairs automatically folded into the fuselage as the main cabin door automatically closed. The copilot made sure it was locked and sealed then armed the door’s emergency chute/life raft then took his seat in the cockpit. Their preflight checklist already having been done, the small corporate bird rolled to its number one for takeoff position.
Bridge yelled out through the opened cockpit door, “Hey, can this thing land on dirt?”
“We’ll find out in twenty-six minutes,” the other pilot said.
Both men looked at each other and simultaneously said, “Fast.”
.G.
Shipsen-Deloitte had spared no expense in appointing their opulent Cayman Island offices. Their clientele ranged from the curious tourist to the serious art investor/collector who took maximum advantage of the island’s notorious financial privacy laws. The London-based provenance company wrote hundreds of millions of dollars, euros and yen from that location every year.
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